Evolutionary game theory for trust

The dynamics of trust in a networked N-player

Trust and trustworthiness are of great importance in social and human systems, especially when considering managerial and economic decision-making. In this paper, we investigate the emergent dynamics of an evolutionary game-theoretic model — the N-player evolutionary trust game — consisting of three types of players: an investor, a trustee who is trustworthy, and a trustee who is untrustworthy. Here, we limit the interactions between players to local neighborhoods defined by a specific spatial topology or social network. Players are able to adjust their game-playing strategies using an evolutionary update rule based on the payoffs obtained by their neighbors. Through comprehensive simulation experiments, we find that it is possible to promote trust when players interact in a social network even if there is a substantial number of untrustworthy individuals in the initial population.

These results differ from findings reported for an unstructured population of the same game, where the existence of a single untrustworthy individual would eliminate trust completely. We compare the dynamics of the model with different social network densities and structures (e.g., from regular lattices to scale-free and random networks). We observe that the levels of trust vary under different network structures, and the level is correlated with how `difficult’ the game is.

When game conditions are easy (i.e., low temptation to defect and/or almost no initial untrustworthy trustees), homogeneous networks with higher densities can promote higher levels of trust. However, when the game becomes harder, heterogeneous social networks with lower densities are able to promote higher levels of trust and global net wealth.

Our study on modelling trust for the sharing economy

In this paper, we present an evolutionary trust game to investigate the formation of trust in the so-called sharing economy from a population perspective. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to model trust in the sharing economy using the evolutionary game theory framework. Our sharing economy trust model consists of four types of players: a trustworthy provider, an untrustworthy provider, a trustworthy consumer, and an untrustworthy consumer. Through systematic simulation experiments, five different scenarios with varying proportions and types of providers and consumers were considered. Our results show that each type of players influences the existence and survival of other types of players, and untrustworthy players do not necessarily dominate the population even when the temptation to defect (i.e., to be untrustworthy) is high. Our findings may have important implications for understanding the emergence of trust in the context of sharing economy transactions.